Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Menzoberranzan

This is a cover I did a while back, that has just been released. The book is called Menzoberranzan - City of Intrigue, and is all about Drows. The assignment asked for a beautiful female drow, flying through her underground city.

Here is what i think is super difficult about Drows: they have black skin and live underground! Which means you are actually painting a dark figure - since they also like to dress black and dark - in a poorly lit environment. As you can see, I chose to do a dark figure against a light back ground.

The steps I am showing are: Thumb/sketch, transferred sketch on board, value version on board and final.

When looking at it now I really wanna change the armguards. they look like something out of a Spiderman Movie.

The original is size 40cm by 50cm and is painted in acrylic. The inked value version I inked with a waterproof filtpen and toned with black acrylic.

max:I smear the backside of a copy with pencil. then I draw ontop to push the grafhite from the copy down onto the board. Then i redraw the whole thing, since the transfering method is not very precise. tedious technic but that is me!

Thanks for the post. You Muddy Color guys really put alot of awesome effort into getting these posts together.

I really like the windows in the background, the detail in the adornments is very nice. It's really fascinating to see the progress from start to finish. I was wondering, did you blur part of the background to give a sense of falling/movement or to show atmospheric perspective? Just curious how you made the decision about which elements of your composition to be in focus and which to be out of focus? It's really effective.

the image needs areas wher ethe eye can ease a bit. Itry not to fill every place with details. But as you said, in the drawing stage and the transferred versions everything seems equally important. In my mind I know which part I want to brush down and make difusse: I alway keep th efigure sharp and kind goes blurry the further back into the background. Guess that is it.